I made a recipe app. I hated ads, and we figured they were really inefficient too. People in a health recipe app want food stuff, and they'd get ads for chocolate or blow up dolls.<p>So I released the app with a "store" button that went to a coming soon page, but let people enter their postcode if they were interested. We also released with a really janky chat system that just flooded later with people asking for where to get some ingredients.<p>We found a partner who sold diet ingredients. They offered to do distribution and delivery, and we'd just tell them who to send it to, then pay 2 weeks later.<p>I added a janky cart system. Users would click add to cart with their personal details and it adds the whole thing to the db. We'd then link the items into a cart based on phone number && delivery status (I did not take database classes at this point and did not know about normalization and JOIN TABLE).<p>So we released expecting someone to accidentally click add to card on maybe 3 items. But nope, it was 300 items within the first hour. What's worse was we didn't have an order management system.<p>I expected most of it to be pranks and fake numbers, but they were real. So I did probably the most heroic bit of coding since college and built a whole order management system in a day. It bundled orders into a "cart", had templates for WhatsApp telling people where to bank in cash, notified an admin if payment or delivery was pending past N days, and let us track who received the orders. Day 1 features. Customers loved the really hands on service, especially us asking if they received the package.<p>We spent 3 full days, day and night, trying to clear the backlog. Orders kept coming in. I asked an accelerator mentor what to do in such a situation, and he said they'd just take the latest orders because the ones from days ago would already be pissed and cancel by now.